Electrical utilities gradually replace traditional means for managing and controlling the quality of electrical power provided to industrial and residential customers with intelligent electronic devices (IEDs), such as digital electric power quality analyzers, electronically-controlled Remote Terminal Units (RTUs), protective relays, fault recorders, and the like.
Increasingly, power quality is becoming an important issue in power monitoring. The sensitivity of today's electronic equipment make them susceptible to power disturbances. For some devices, a momentary disturbance can cause scrambled data, interrupted communications, a frozen mouse, system crashes and equipment failure. Furthermore, power quality issues cause businesses problems such as lost productivity, idle people and equipment, lost transactions and overtime required to make up for lost work time.
In operation, conventional IEDs provide a broad nomenclature of monitoring functions. However, there is still a need for IEDs capable of monitoring power quality parameters and, in operation, being wirelessly connectible to communication networks. Therefore, further improvements in the IEDs would be desirable.